''Vitamin C can truthfully be designated as
the antitoxic and antiviral vitamin."

(C.W.
Jungeblut, MD)

As if the Cuban missile crisis
wasn’t enough, I
had even more to be worried about as a child at the turn of the1960’s. When
all of us in first grade had been told that we were to be vaccinated against
polio, I for one didn’t want to go near the school on that day. Regardless of
my fear of needles, I had no choice in the matter. So, like all the rest of
the kids, I braced up, got in line, and marched down the tiled hallway to
meet my fate. When I got to the school nurse’s office, I was astounded to be
handed a lump of sugar with a drop of something soaking into it. I was told
to eat it. I did. Then I was told I could go. Escape without a shot? What a
fantastic turn of events. Life could begin anew.

In time,
my classmates and I would all learn the name of our painless benefactor, Dr.
Albert Sabin. With more time, I would find that his live oral vaccine had
become the leading cause of polio in the US. What surprised me most was
that the strongest criticism originated from the most eminent of sources: the
other polio hero, Dr. Jonas Salk. On September 24, 1976, the Washington Post reported Dr. Salk’s
assertion that the Sabin live oral virus vaccine had been the “principal if
not sole cause” of every reported polio case in the United States since 1961. (1)
Salk repeated this accusation July 6, 1977, when he was interviewed on CBC
television (2), saying: “(W)e have known now since 1961 in the United States,
and prior to that in other countries, that the live virus vaccine for polio
does cause the disease itself.”

In 1996,
one year after Salk died, the US Centers for Disease Control began a turn-away
from the oral live vaccine and recommended killed virus injections for the
first two rounds of infant polio immunization. By 2000, CDC stated that
"To eliminate the risk for vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis,
an all-Injected Polio Virus schedule is recommended for routine childhood
vaccination in the United
States." (3) Thus only after two
decades would orthodoxy at last take heed of the cautionary words of Dr.
Salk, the man credited with creating the first polio vaccination.

From Fame to Ascorbate to
Obscurity

Sabin and
Salk had media visibility, a professional rivalry, and a personal animosity
spanning decades. Everyone today knows their names. By contrast, the public
and orthodox medicine are yet to pay proper attention to the work of Dr.
Claus Jungeblut. In his New York Times
obituary (4), we learn that Claus Washington Jungeblut received his M.D. from
the University of Bern in 1921 and, between 1921 and 1923, conducted
research at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. After employment as a
bacteriologist for the New York State Department of Health from 1923 until
1927, he became Associate Professor at StanfordUniversity
from 1927 until 1929, when he joined the faculty at the Columbia University
College of Physicians and Surgeons as Associate Professor of Bacteriology.
Named a full professor in 1937, Jungeblut retired June 30, 1962. He died
February 1, 1976, aged 78, at home in Westport,
Connecticut.

In his
day, Jungeblut was justly regarded as an important player in polio research. While
recent revisionist history of the fight against polio has generally
downplayed his contribution to the crusade, it has totally sidestepped what
was arguably his most important discovery: that ascorbate is prevention and
cure for polio. Amazingly, Jungeblut first published this idea in 1935. (5)
His research on ascorbate was sweeping and profound, extending well beyond
the topic of polio. In 1935, he also had shown that vitamin C inactivated
diphtheria toxin. (6) By 1937, Jungeblut demonstrated that ascorbate
inactivated tetanus toxin. (7) John T. A. Ely, PhD, writes: “In the 1930's,
the remarkable Claus W. Jungeblut, MD . . . first reported that ascorbic acid
in concentrations, attainable in humans by a high intake, could inactivate
and or protect against numerous viral and bacterial pathogens and their
toxins. These include the polio, hepatitis and herpes viruses. . . One of
(Jungeblut’s) earliest research findings was ascorbic acid’s ability to
neutralize and render harmless many bacterial toxins, such as tetanus,
diphtheria, and staph toxins.” (8)

Unlike
oral polio vaccination, vitamin C has never caused polio. Yet how many people
have you met, physicians included, who know vitamin C has been known to
prevent and cure poliomyelitis for nearly 70 years? It was never really a
secret. On September 18, 1939, Time
magazine reported that “Last week, at the Manhattan meeting of the International
Congress for Microbiology, two new clues turned up. (One is) Vitamin C.” (9)
The article describes how Jungeblut, while studying statistics of the 1938
Australian polio epidemic, deduced that low vitamin C status was associated
with the disease.

After
that, Jungeblut is rarely highlighted by the popular or professional media.
And, where he and his work are memorialized, there is no mention of
ascorbate. The US National Library of Medicine has the broadest collection of
his papers and laboratory data encompassing 42 years, 1922 to 1964.Oddly enough, the six boxes of documents
are incongruously housed in NLM’s Tropical Medicine Manuscript Collection.
(10) Perhaps the only flag for the nutritionally curious is a note that the
contents description names Albert Szent-Gyorgyi among Jungeblut’s
correspondents. Even at ColumbiaUniversity, where he
taught for 33 years (1929-1962), records are scanty. “We have very little on
Claus W. Jungeblut, which is odd considering how long he served on the
faculty,” said Stephen E. Novak, head of archives at the ColumbiaUniversityMedicalCenter’s
Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library. (11)

Whatever Happened to Ascorbate
Therapy for Polio?

When
discussion about poliomyelitis turns towards megascorbate prophylaxis and
treatment, there is no more frequent rejoinder than this: “If vitamin C
therapy were so good, all doctors would be using it.”

In his
book The Healing Factor, Irwin
Stone explains why they’re not:

“The
application of ascorbic acid in the treatment of poliomyelitis is an
incredible story of high hopes that end in disappointment . . . And then,
when a worker finally seemed to be on the right path and had demonstrated
success, hardly anyone believed his results, which were systematically
ignored. . . Within two years after the discovery of ascorbic acid, Jungeblut
showed that ascorbic acid would inactivate the virus of poliomyelitis. This
was followed, in 1936-1937, in rapid succession by other workers showing
similar inactivation of other viruses: by Holden et al., using the herpes
virus; by Kligler and Bernkopf, on the vaccina virus, by Lagenbusch and
Enderling, with the virus of hoof-and-mouth disease; by Amato, on the rabies
virus; by Lominski, using bacteriophage; and by Lojkin and Martin, with the
tobacco mosaic disease virus. Thus, at this early date it was established
that ascorbic acid had the potential of being a wide-spectrum antiviral
agent. Here was a new “magic bullet” that was effective against a wide
variety of viruses and was known to be completely harmless. . . (T)his work
was being carried out in the pre-Salk days. Then, all a doctor could do in a
polio case was apply symptomatic relief and hope for the best. An epidemic
could run its course without much interference from medicine and an
effective, harmless virucide would have been a priceless commodity. Jungeblut
continued his work and published a series of papers from 1936 to 1939 in
which he showed that the administration of ascorbic acid to monkeys infected
with poliomyelitis produced a distinct reduction in the severity of the
disease and enhanced their resistance to it. Sabin, attempting to reproduce Jungeblut’s
work on monkeys, failed to obtain these partially successful results. In
further efforts to explain their variable clinical results, both scientists
got bogged down chasing the technical details of the tests. It may be easy
for us to look back now and say that the size and the frequency of the
dosages were insufficient to maintain high levels of ascorbic acid in the
blood during the incubation of the disease. The upshot was that the negative
findings of Sabin effectively stifled further research in this field for a
decade. . .In his 1952 paper,
Frederick R. Klenner, MD . . . comments on Jungeblut’s earlier work, stating
that his results were indecisive because the amount of vitamin C given was
inadequate to cope with the degree of infection. Sabin’s results were not as
suggestive as Jungeblut’s because he, Sabin, used a greater dose of virus and
less vitamin C. If high blood and tissue levels of ascorbic acid are
continuously maintained, an extremely unfavorable environment for viral
growth and reproduction is created in the human body.” (12)

Robert
Landwehr adds: “(S)ince 1939 polio experts were quite certain that vitamin C
was not effective against polio. There seemed little doubt that Dr. Albert B.
Sabin, a highly respected figure in medical research even before he developed
his successful vaccines, had demonstrated that vitamin C had no value in
combating polio viruses. In 1939 he published a paper showing that vitamin C
had no effect in preventing paralysis in rhesus monkeys experimentally infected
with a strain of polio virus. He had tried to corroborate the work of Dr.
Claus W. Jungeblut, another highly respected medical researcher, who had
published in 1935 and 1937 papers indicating that vitamin C might be of
benefit. Sabin could not reproduce Jungeblut’s results even though he
consulted Jungeblut during the course of the experiments. It seemed to be a
fair trial, and Sabin’s negative results virtually ended experiments with
vitamin C and polio.” (13)

Klenner
said that there was a simple reason for Sabin’s well-reported failures: the
dosage was far too low. He writes (14):

“From a
review of the literature one can safely state that in all instances of
experimental work with ascorbic acid on the virus organism, in experimental
animals, the amount of virus used was far beyond the range of the
administered dose of this vitamin. . . . Jungeblut (in 1937)
stated that the parenteral administration of natural vitamin C during the
incubation period of poliomyelitis in monkeys is always followed by a
distinct change in the severity of the disease; that after the fifth day of
the disease larger doses are required. . . One of the most unfortunate
mistakes in all of the research on poliomyelitis was Sabin’s unscientific attempt to confirm Jungeblut’s work with
vitamin C against the polio virus in monkeys. Jungeblut in infecting his
rhesus monkeys used the mild “droplet method” and then administered vitamin C
by needle in varying amounts up 400 mg/day. . . (Even) with almost
infinitesimal amounts, as we at present recognize, he was able to demonstrate
in one series that the non-paralytic survivors was six times as great as in
the controls. On the other hand, Sabin, in infecting his monkeys did not
follow the procedure given by Jungeblut whose experiments he was attempting
to repeat, but instead employed a more forceful method of inoculation which
obviously resulted in sickness of maximum severity. Sabin further refused to
follow Jungeblut’s suggestion as to the dose of vitamin C to be used. By
Sabin’s actual report the amount given was rarely more than 35 per cent of
that used by his associate. (In 1939) Sabin makes this significant statement:
‘One monkey was given 400 mg of vitamin C for one day at the suggestion of
Jungeblut who felt that large doses was necessary to effect a change in the
course of the disease.’ Yet on the basis of Sabin’s work the negative value
of vitamin C in the treatment of virus diseases has been for years accepted
as final.”

Klenner, who published
several papers discussing his success using megadoses of ascorbate with polio
patients, administered many thousands of milligrams of ascorbate daily. This
dosage is enormously different from Sabin’s low doses, normally only
one-third of Jungeblut’s. Furthermore, Sabin gave one and only one single
“large dose” of 400 mg, to only one animal, and for only one day.Sadly, adds Klenner, “Sabin's negative report
on the value of ascorbic acid on the poliomyelitis virus stopped Jungeblut's
work.” (15) Fortunately, it did not stop Klenner, who piloted megascorbate
therapy for his patients during the 1948 polio epidemic. “For patients
treated in the home,” writes Klenner, “the dose schedule was 2,000 mg by
needle every six hours, supplemented by 1,000 to 2,000 mg every two hours by
mouth.” That is a total of 8,000 mg/day intramuscularly, plus, allowing for
sleep, oral doses in the range of an additional 16,000 to 32,000 mg. This
yields a total between 20,000 and 40,000 mg of vitamin C per day.

Curiously,
the only report on vitamin C and polio that Klenner had at that time read was
Sabin’s negative one. Klenner writes that his own
“observations of the action of ascorbic acid on virus diseases were made
independently of any knowledge of previous studies using vitamin C on virus
pathology, except for the negative report of Sabin after treating Rhesus
monkeys experimentally infected with the poliomyelitis virus.” Then he
reviewed the literature, finding “an almost unbelievable record of such
studies. The years of labor in animal experimentation, the cost in human
effort and in grants, and the volumes written, make it difficult to
understand how so many investigators could have failed in comprehending the
one thing that would have given positive results a decade ago. This one thing
was the size of the dose of vitamin C employed and the frequency of its
administration. In all fairness it must be said that Jungeblut noted on
several occasions that he attributed his failure of results to the
possibility that the strength of his injectable ‘C’ was inadequate. It was he
who unequivocally said that ‘'vitamin C can truthfully be designated as the
antitoxic and antiviral vitamin.’" (15)

In 1935,
nylon was created and the discovery of the neutron won the Nobel. The Gallup poll was begun,
and Errol Flynn had his first movie starring role in Captain Blood. At this time, the year the DC-3 first went into service,
when a first-class postage stamp cost 3 cents, Claus W. Jungeblut was the
first scientist to proclaim that ascorbate was antiviral. All that remained
was to use enough of it.

In the
late 1970’s, as a young father, and long before I had ever heard of Dr.
Jungeblut, I was earnestly applying megadoses of ascorbate due to what I’d
read by Irwin Stone and Frederick Klenner. Their papers, written standing
solidly upon Jungeblut’s shoulders, were the primary reason I was able to
raise healthy children without Salk shots or Sabin sugar cubes. But, by
golly, my kids certainly took a lot of vitamin C. From seven decades past,
Claus W. Jungeblut has directly influenced the course of every orthomolecular
practitioner, and earned the thanks of every patient whose health, and life,
has been saved by ascorbate therapy.

Of Dr.
Jungeblut’s many research reports, 22 were published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. They
are archived and available for free online access at http://www.jem.org/contents-by-date.0.shtml
Key papers regarding ascorbate include:

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